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From: Magnus Hagander <[email protected]>
To: Josh Berkus <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: Tino Wildenhain <[email protected]>
Cc: Guillaume Lelarge <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
Cc: Adrian Maier <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Multi-language to be or not to be
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:18:27 +0100
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
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	<[email protected]>

Josh Berkus wrote:
> Magnus,
> 
> I have to say "I told you so".   When the existing translation scheme was 
> built two+ years ago, I pointed out that it was cumbersome, confusing and 
> inaccessable and predicted that none of our non-English communities would use 
> it.

Nah, you can't say "i told you so", because I wasn't around the webteam
when that was built :-P


> So, my vote is that whether or not we have *an* translation infrastructure, 
> the current incomplete and non-standard infrastructure be junked.  It's never 
> going to be used in its current form.

ok.
If we're doing this, we should definitely decide so *before* the French
and German guys who just said they might do it get started.

So perhaps the deal is junk what we have now, and then think hard about
how it should *really* work? With proper input from the people who are
actually going to use it?


> Further, we're going to have to expect that some language communities will 
> never translate the main site, since that puts them in a position of having 
> all new content generated in English and just having their site mirror that 
> without the ability to add new content originating in their group.   And I 
> don't think that most of our language groups are large enough to sustain both 
> organizing content for their site and keeping translations of the English 
> site updated. 

That was what I thought originally in this thread. Seems at least the
French community disagrees with us.


> P.S.  Josh D, you are absolutely wrong about our language composition.   The 
> majority of our community speaks a first language other than English, and at 
> least half of the non-English speakers aren't fluent in English.  There are 
> large communities in Brazil, Spanish-speaking South America, Italy and 
> Germany -- as well as Japan -- which you aren't aware of because they don't 
> join the English-speaking MLs for obvious reasons.  When I used to answer 
> webmaster@, for example, I got *more* questions in Portuguese than in 
> English.
> 

Right. In case you didn't noticed, we added some google analytics stuff
to the website (because it was the easiest way) and will be collecting
some visitor statistics over the next couple of days - wrt where in the
world people are coming from, and what languages their browsers are
configured for.

//Magnus

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